7 tips to create the perfect procedure for your food blog tasks

Why creating procedures for working on a food blog is important?

A food blog can quickly become an operation and operations should be managed properly. One of the most important aspects of managing operations is the procedures and processes that go along in the day to day tasks for the operation to be functional and progressing effectively.

Too many repetitive tasks

When managing a food blog, it's really important to be constantly updating and rearranging old recipe, blog posts, categories. There is also a lot of work to be done pinning images on Pinterest, writing posts and stories on Instagram and a lot of work in general on social networks.

These tasks can become repetitive and in addition there is a need for going through all the recipes or posts on your blog at least in order to update data, improve title, subtitles and text in general, add more links, embedding new videos etc.

But with all that work who has time for sitting and creating procedures?

It's understood that time is the most expensive resource you may have when managing a food blog - there are already tons of tasks to be done like conceiving new recipes or kitchen tips to be posted, cooking and taking professional food photographs, marketing, social networks, managing the community and answering reader's questions and a lot more.

In addition, it's important to keep in mind that having good procedures written can potentially:

• save time

• reduce mistakes

• reduce training length

• achieve consistent results

• allow you to delegate work

Also having bad procedures in place would potentially cause errors, increase training time and costs, waste money and worse - they don’t get read or used.

"Procedures Maintain Organizational Knowledge" - Some Manager

Knowledge is shared between employees mainly in the onboarding phase - the new hires are assigned a buddy or mentor and get acquainted with the main business processes.

But after ew employees are in a workplace long enough they sort of tend to stop asking questions and start acting with more confidence and that's not bad. So when having procedures written and saved in a public or shared folder the knowledge is always available even after the employees are veteran.

So here they go - these are our 7 tips for creating the perfect procedure

1 - Define the WHY

Why? When you create a procedure you are asking someone to deliver a task. Start with defining why do you need this task and why this task is important for your food blog business.

2 - Set Expectations

Let it be clear in the procedure what is the definition of done, when do you expect the task to be delivered, how long do you estimate each step in the procedure and whatever you can to set the expectations and to be able to discuss estimations with whoever will be doing this procedure in the future.

3 - Add Clear Step by Step tasks

When writing the steps that should be done in order to complete the task break them down in the smallest steps possible and try to be clear what has to be achieved on each step. For example instead of having one of the steps being:

It should be something like

4 - Add Screenshots!

When someone from your team starts working on the blog it's sometimes a bit hard on them to get to know all the mechanisms, tools, content management systems, email providers, etc that can come with joining an online team.

If the procedure includes screenshots it will make a lot easier for the person who will start working on the task to be able to get acquainted with the mechanisms in place such as dashboards, where are menus and functionality located, etc.

5 - Make it available

From dropbox to google drive or microsoft cloud solutions nowadays there is no reason to share a folder with the procedure documents inside with everybody in the team. This brings accessibility to the available knowledge together with transparency. Every team player has access to the "how-tos" for everything that is done in the business.

6 - Don't write all procedures by yourself

Make them write the procedure. Who? The new guy!

You need your time to focus on advancing the business and its future plans. People learn more about their job and role if they write it down by themselves. It gives them responsibility, a feeling of freedom and ownership and that's crucial for their success. Of course after a while there will be no need for writing procedures all the time but having new employees update old procedures could also add a lot.

7 - Maintain and Update

So as said before the procedures should be good in order to not cause frustration and procedures sometimes may get old because tools change, dashboard have their UI and interfaces revamped, menus change location in the screen etc.

Having your employees own the procedures they work on is a very strong tool to have them maintained and have the team members knowledgeable about their role and what should they focus on.

Do you have more examples? Questions? Comments? Let us know down here.

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